pennyspoetryfandomcom-20200214-history
Frederic Prokosch
and Wikimedia Commons.]] '''Frederic Prokosch' (May 17, 1906 - June 2, 1989) Robert Greenfield, Dreamer’s Journey: The Life and Writings of Frederic Prokosch (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2010), p. 17, 400. was an American poet and prose writer, known for his novels, poetry, memoirs and criticism. He was also a distinguished translator. Life Prokosch was born in Madison, Wisconsin, into an intellectual family that travelled widely. His father, Eduard Prokosch, an Austrian immigrant, was professor of Germanic languages at Yale University at the time of his death in 1938.Editors (August 12, 1938) "Prokosch of Yale Is Killed in Crash." New York Times. p. 17. Frederic graduated from Haverford College in 1925, and earned a Ph.D. in English in 1932 from Yale University. In his youth, he was an accomplished racquetball player; he represented the Yale Club in the 1937 New York State squash racquets championship.Editors (January 16, 1937) "Adams Turns back Foulke in 5 games." New York Times. p. 23. He won the squash-racquets championship of France in 1938. During World War II, Prokosch was a cultural attaché at the American Legation in Sweden. He spent most of the remainder of his life in Europe, where he led a peripatetic existence. His interests were sports (tennis and squash), lepidoptery, and the printing of limited editions of poems that he admired. From early on, Prokosch sought to surround himself with a veil of mystification and cast his life into a hopeless riddle. Approaching his 60th year, he boasted that no person had succeeded in knowing him as an integral personality: "I have spent my life alone, utterly alone, and no biography of me could ever more than scratch the surface. All the facts in Who’s Who, or whatever, are so utterly meaningless. My real life (if I ever dared to write it!) has transpired in darkness, secrecy, fleeting contacts and incommunicable delights, any number of strange picaresque escapades and even crimes, and I don't think that any of my 'friends' have even the faintest notion of what I'm really lie or have any idea of what my life has really consisted of. . . .With all the surface 'respectability,' diplomatic and scholarly and illustrious social contacts, my real life has been subversive, anarchic, vicious, lonely, and capricious." Frederic Prokosch, letter to John Radcliffe Squires, 17 June 1963, Special Collections, Washington University Libraries, St. Louis. See also Greenfield, Dreamer’s Journey, p. 17. The publication of Voices: A Memoir in 1983, advertised as a record of his encounters with some of the century's leading artists and writers, returned Prokosch to the limelight. His early novels The Asiatics and The Seven Who Fled were reissued to much public acclaim. In 2010, Voices was shown to be almost wholly fictitious and part of an enormous hoax.Greenfield, Dreamer’s Journey, “Disembodied Voices,” pp. 376-390. Prokosch died in Le Plan-de-Grasse (near Grasse), France. Writing Prokosch's novels The Asiatics and The Seven Who Fled received widespread attention in the 1930s. The action in both of these narratives takes place in Asia, a continent Prokosch had not visited but wrote about from his imagination and from book and maps. Landscape descriptions are so prevalent that the landscape often takes on the role of a character in its own right. Albert Camus said about The Seven Who Fled, "Prokosch has invented what might be called the geographical novel, in which he mingles sensuality with irony, lucidity with mystery. He conveys a fatalistic sense of life half hidden beneath a rich animal energy. He is a master of moods and undertones, a virtuoso in the feeling of place, and he writes in a style of supple elegance." Greenfield, Dreamer’s Journey, p. 42. See also note 16, p. 409. New York Times critic L.H. Titterton wrote about The Asiatics: :"Whether such adventures ever happened to any one man, or whether, as seems far more likely, the author has supplemented certain experiences of his own by a rich imagination, using as its basis information gathered through wide reading, is immaterial. For this is actually a quiet, meditative book into which adventurous episodes have been introduced simply as a device for displaing various aspects of the Asiatic mind and spirit. It is the work of a man of a deeply poetic nature possessed of an astonishing ability to describe in a few words a color, a scene, an odor, an emotional situation, an attitude of mind, an idea; words so well chosen that passage after passage seems perfectly to express some truth that we have many times, in a stumbling way, attempted to state.Titterton, L.H. (October 27, 1935) "A Glowing Evocation of the Asian Way of Life." New York Times. p. BR3. Writing in the New York Times, Harold Strauss said about The Seven Who Fled (which won the Harper Prize): :In singing, supple prose, with an evocative power strange to our earthbound ears, with passion and often with fury, Frederic Prokosch takes us off to the vast, mysterious reaches of Central Asia. It is a weird adventure of the spirit on which he leads us. For, mistake not, despite the apparently realistic description of the endless reaches of the desert, of the topless towers of the snow-capped mountains, of the huddling villages in which men rot away in poverty and disease, this Central Asia of Prokosch's is no actual place upon the face of the earth. Like Xanadu, like Arcadia, like Atlantis or Aea or Poictesme, it is a phantom manufactured by a restless mind. ...Whatever the meaning of this book, and there will be much debate on that score, its wild lyrinative splendor and its profound emotional content mark it as a memorable novel.Strauss, Harold (August 29, 1937) "A Strange and Haunting Tale Set in Central Asia; Frederic Prokosch, in 'The Seven Who Fled,' Writes a Memorable Novel of Spiritual Adventure." New York Times. p. 81. After the 1930s, popular interest in Prokosch's writing declined, but he continued to write steadily and to solidify his reputation as a writer’s writer with an elite following that included Thomas Mann, André Gide, Sinclair Lewis, Albert Camus, Thornton Wilder, Dylan Thomas, Anthony Burgess, Raymond Queneau, Somerset Maugham, Lawrence Durrell, Gore Vidal, and T.S. Eliot. “Pondering about Prokosch and his fate, I have come to the conclusion,” wrote Isaac Bashevis Singer, “that he is himself in a way at fault for being so woefully neglected. He has not cared to husband his natural riches….His roots are in this land. If Prokosch, like Faulkner, had limited his creative energies to one milieu, one region, he would certainly be counted today among the pillars of American literature.” Singer, Isaac Bashevis, "On the Courage to be Old-Fashioned," Book World, January 14, 1968, p.6. See also Greenfield, Dreamer's Journey, p. 19. Among the most noteworthy of Prokosch’s latter-day writings are A Tale for Midnight (1955), a Gothicized retelling of the Cenci story; The Missolonghi Manuscript (1968), a “mediation” on the romantic artist; and America, My Wilderness (1972), an excursion into magical realism. Recognition Prokosch was named a Commander dans l'Order des Arts et Lettres by the French government in 1984 and awarded the Volterra Prize two years later. His novels have been translated into 15 languages. Publications Poetry *''The Assassins''. New Haven, CT: privately published, 1936; New York: Harper, 1936; London: Chatto & Windus, 1936. *''The Carnival: Poems''. New York & London: Harper, 1938. *''Death at Sea: Poems''. New York & London: Harper, 1940; London: Chatto & Windus, 1940. *''Chosen Poems''. London: Chatto & Windus, 1944; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1947. Novels *''The Asiatics: A novel''. New York: Harper, 1935; London: Chatto & Windus, 1935. *''The Seven Who Fled''. New York: Harper, 1935; London: Chatto & Windus, 1937. *''Night of the Poor''. New York: Harper, 1938; London: Chatto & Windus, 1939. *''The Skies of Europe''. New York: Harper, 1941; London: Chatto & Windus, 1942. *''The Conspirators''. New York: Harper, 1943; London: Chatto & Windus, 1943. *''Age of Thunder''. Nrew York: Harper, 1945; London: Readers' Union / Chatto & Windus, 1946. *''The Idyls of the Cave''. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1946; London: Chatto & Windus, 1947; Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973. *''Storm and Echo''. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1948; London: Fbber, 1949. *''Nine days to Mukalla''. New York: Viking, 1953; London: Transworld, 1961. *''A Tale for Midnight''. Boston: Little, Brown, 1955; London: Secker & Warburg, 1956. *''Under the Winter Moon'' (as "Teresa Brooke"). Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1958; London: Alvin Redman, 1959.Under the Winter Moon: A novel, , WorldCat, OCLC Online Computer Library Center Inc. Web, Oct. 20, 2018. *Philip Van Rensselaer, Mother Was Always in Love: A novel (uncredited author). New York, Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1960.Search results = ti:Mother was always in love, WorldCat, OCLC Online Computer Library Center Inc. Web, Oct. 20, 2018. *''A Ballad of Love''. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1960; London: Secker & Warburg, 1960. *''The Seven Sisters'. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1962; London: Secker & Warburg, 1962. *''The Dark Dancer. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1964; London: W.H. Allen, 1965. *''The Wreck of the Cassandra''. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1966; London: W.H. Allen, 1966. *''The Missolonghi Manuscript''. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1968; London: W.H. Allen, 1968. *''America My Wilderness''. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1972; London: W.H. Allen, 1972. *''Voices: A memoir'' (fictional autobiography). New York: Farrar, Straus, 1982; London: Faber, 1983. Translated *Johann Christian Friedrich Hoelderlin, Some Poems. Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1943. *Louise Labé, Love Sonnets. New York: New Directions, 1947. Edited *''Zephyr Book of American Verse''. London & Stockholm: Continental Book, 1945. Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.Search results = au:Frederic Prokosch, WorldCat, OCLC Online Computer Library Center Inc. Web, Oct. 20, 2018. See also *List of U.S. poets References *Radcliffe Squires, Frederic Prokosch. New York: Twayne, 1964. *Peter Max, Frederic Prokosch, ein Romantiker des 20. Jahrhunderts: Mit bes. Berücks. d. Romane "The Asiatics" u. "The Seven Who Fled". Winterthur: Schellenberg, 1969. *Nicholas Barker, The Butterfly Books: An enquiry into the nature of certain twentieth century pamphlets. London: Bertram Rota, 1987. *Gore Vidal, "The Collector", in The Last Empire: Essays, 1952-2000. Vintage, 2000. *Robert M. Greenfield, Dreamer's Journey: The life and writings of Frederic Prokosch. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2010. Fonds *Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center] at the University of Texas at Austin, where a large collection of Prokosch's papers is held. Notes External links ;Poems *Four poems in Poetry, 1940 ;Books *Frederic Prokosh at Amazon.com ;About *Frederic Prokosch, expatriate author, poet, and professor (obituary) at the Los Angeles Times, 1989 *Frederic Prokosch and the Butterfly Books, an account of Prokosch's forgeries of his own work Category:1906 births Category:1989 deaths Prokosh, Frederic Category:American memoirists Category:American novelists Category:American poets Category:American translators Category:Guggenheim Fellows Prokosh, Frederic Category:American racquetball players Category:20th-century American novelists Category:20th-century poets Category:English-language poets Category:Poets